Microsoft confirmed that security updates (Patch Tuesday) this month will be delayed and that they will take place in March due to a last minute bug.
Initially, Microsoft announced that it had decided to delay the release of Patch Tuesday due to issues it did not want to disclose, and although some believed that all patches will be released next Tuesday, the company probably has other plans.
Microsoft is said to be releasing all of them updates on the next Patch Tuesday which will take place on March 14th.
“We will be rolling out updates as part of the scheduled informationof March on Tuesday, March 14, 2017,” the company said today, without providing any other information about what went wrong.
“Our first priority is to provide the best possible experience to our customers in keeping and protection of their systems. This month, we discovered at the last minute an issue that could affect some customers and was not resolved in time for our scheduled upgrade. After considering all the options, we decided to delay this month's updates. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by change "Microsoft said in the initial announcement.
Let's mention that the delay of Patch Tuesday until March of 2017 means that the company's systems will be vulnerable to SMB (zero-day) vulnerability whose exploit has already been posted on the Internet.
In accordance with US-CERT, the SMB flaw already being exploited by cyber criminals, and there is no effective solution to protect 100 per cent.
Without a patch from Microsoft, users will remain vulnerable for another month. Experts report the blocking of outgoing SMB connections (on TCP 139 and 445 ports and UDP 137 and 138 ports) from the local WAN as a temporary security measure.